Mike Argento: Look out for flying debris while jogging on the rail trail

A piece of metal that Joe Heidler said nearly hit him as he was running on the York County Heritage Rail Trail. (Submitted)

Joe Heidler and a few friends have a routine. A couple of times a week, they meet at Days Mill along the York Heritage Rail Trail and go for a run, usually on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. They run into town and back, about a six-mile course or so. It's a good run; the trail is a safe place to run. You don't have to worry about getting hit by a car or plowed into by a truck. It's better than running alongside a country highway or city street.

It's usually pretty quiet too.

Except for the stretch of the trail that passes by J&K Salvage, near Richland Avenue. The salvage yard shreds junk cars using a huge shredder, the kind that could shred all of the documents produced by the federal government in the blink of an eye. There is also a large crane that lifts the car to the shredder. Obviously, it's not possible to shred cars quietly.

The salvage yard is about 100 yards or so from the trail, on the other side of a pair of railroad tracks, an access road and a makeshift wall constructed by stacking two rows of old trailers. It's not right on top of the trail, which is good.

The noise isn't what bothered Heidler and his fellow runners on a recent Tuesday morning.

They were running along, about two and a half miles into it, when they passed the salvage yard. As he ran, Heidler saw something out of the corner of his eye.

It was a chunk of metal. It flew right by his head, right in front of his face.

The guys running with him didn't see it.

But Heidler did, and it was a kind of scary. It could have stoved his head in.

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They stopped. One of the guys said they had to go over to the salvage yard and tell them what happened. Somebody, they reasoned, could get killed, or at the very least maimed. They thought the salvage yard would want to know about that and, perhaps, do something to prevent it in the future. It wasn't the kind of thing they thought the business would want to tolerate.

They looked around and found the piece of metal by the side of the trail. It looked like part of a spring, the kind used in car or truck suspensions, one coil that had been sheared off. It was bigger than Heidler's hand. It was still hot, he said, very hot.

They went over to J&K and first encountered an employee who cursed at them and impolitely asked them to leave, Heidler said. “I guess his job was being the junk yard dog,” Heidler joked.

They didn't leave. Instead, they went to the office. There, a woman told them they'd have to talk to the owner, Joe Darrah, who, she said, wasn't there.

“My only concern,” Heidler told me, “is somebody could get hurt. They need to put something up to catch something if it comes flying out. I thought they'd want to know about it.”

He doubts the wall fashioned from trailers would stop anything. It didn't, he said.

Heidler went back to work — he and his wife run a contracting business — and sent an e-mail to Darrah and to the York County Parks, figuring that since the trail was a county park, the county would want to know about it.

He didn't hear anything, immediately.

“I kind of doubted anybody would do anything about it, so I sent it to you,” he told me.

On Monday, York County Parks director Tammy Klunk sent Heidler an email, writing that in the mid-2000s, there had been a problem with debris from the salvage yard flying onto the trail. The salvage yard, she wrote, made several changes to correct it. She also said the chief park ranger met with Darrah and rangers inspected the trail and surrounding areas for debris.

I reached Darrah on Monday, and he said he hadn't talked to Heidler yet. He said the salvage yard has been there since 1999 and “we never had any issues” with metal escaping its boundaries.

“I don't know how it could have happened,” Darrah said. He said they have the fence made from trailers and “I don't see it getting over them. I don't know how it would have happened.”

I called Heidler back, and he said Darrah had called him Monday morning.

“He seemed more upset that I called you than anything,” Heidler said.

And that was that.

The lesson, I suppose, is that the rail trail may be a good place for a run.

Just keep an eye out for hunks of flying car parts.

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.ydr.com/mike. Or follow him on Twitter at @FnMikeArgento.

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